Saturday, November 5, 2011

These are the steps for installing MeeGo 1.2 for Netbooks in Virtualbox. These steps were tested on Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7. Steps are the same on both OSs, and screenshots were taken from Ubuntu 10.04.

Second, covert the extension from the downloaded MeeGo image from (*.img) to (*iso).

Then, open Virtualbox and create a new machine.

Make sure you indicate the machine as a Fedora Linux version, with Ram 512MB or higher (MeeGo Wiki says 1GB) and at least 5GB of disk space. Also make sure you enable the options of "Enable PAE/NX" and "Enable 3D Acceleration".

Here are screenshots of this step:

Now let's start our new virtual machine. From the menu appearing, chose "Installation Only", wait until some operations end, then the UI wizard will appear. The steps of installation are almost straight forward. And after installation, A message will say that you should not remove the USB stick (or the virtual CD ROM in our case) until you press the "Close" button. So press "Close" and then un-mount the CD ROM from the Virtualbox menu: Machine -> CD/DVD Devices -> Unmount. Then reboot the machine from: Machine -> Reset.

After restarting, the wizard will continue with some basic settings. When going through these steps, they went fine on Windows 7, but on Ubuntu 10.04 I had to reset the machine a couple of times to finish the settings steps and move to the next step. BTW: The blue splash screen at the beginning of these steps may stay for a few seconds.

Now we come to a little dirty part. At this moment, the machine may start normally without any effort. But some other times you need to do the following steps. These steps are the best I could write after searching and trying for hours:

First wait until the first blue screen appears and press "ESC" on the keyboard. This will view a list with one option to boot MeeGo. Press "Tab" key to edit the command of launching MeeGo, remove the last part of "quite vga=current" and replace it with "init 3" then hit the "Enter" key.

Some commands will appear quickly on the screen, wait until you see the login screen.

Do a login with the username/password you have set in the previous steps. Then write:sudo su
[enter the password again]chmod +s /usr/bin/Xorguxlaunch

Now you should wait for a few seconds to see the MeeGo home screen appearing.

If you want to shutdown the machine in a legal way, you will notice that there is no "Shutdown" button. But you can still choose "Machine -> ACPI Shutdown" from the virtual machine menubar.

There is another final note: Although I had to write the terminal commands whenever I launch the machine on Windows 7, I found the machine booting normally on Ubuntu 10.04 once I hit the "Start" button.Update: It booted fine on both OSs. The problem was because I did not make a legal shutdown, so the session was not saved.